The 1882 Foundation
Chinese-Americans remember a time when U.S.
law excluded most Chinese
By Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, adapted by Newsela staff
12.08.14
Most Americans know about our nation’s
history of slavery. Many also know that during
World War II, Japanese-Americans were
placed in special prison camps.
Less well-known is that for more than 60 years,
the United States officially excluded an entire
ethnic group: Chinese immigrants.
The Chinese Exclusion Act, as it came to be
known, was passed by Congress in 1882. It
was not lifted until 1943, when politicians acted
partly out of embarrassment over the fact that
China was a U.S. ally in World War II.
Some Got In
While the law kept many Chinese out of the
United States, some were able to get in,
especially if they had money to start a
business.
One of those early arrivals was Hoy Fung, who
set up what may have been the first Chinese
restaurant in the Pittsburgh region, the
Bellevue Tea Garden in Bellevue,
Pennsylvania. The restaurant operated from
1926 to 1997, said his daughter, Karen Yee.
The history of official discrimination against the
Chinese is one reason that Yee became
involved in the 1970s with the Organization of
Chinese-Americans, or OCA.
However, she also joined the group for another
reason altogether. “When my father came to
America," Yee said, "he said many of the
people he met in Bellevue were very helpful
and kind, and so we should try to give back.”
Ted Gong is another OCA activist. A retired
State Department employee, Gong helped set
up the 1882 Foundation to educate people
about the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Gong said the exclusion act came after many
discriminatory local laws were passed in the
West Coast states where most Chinese
immigrants first settled. “In California, for
instance, if you carried your laundry and
delivered it on poles, you would be taxed more
than for wagon deliveries." The higher tax rate,
he said, "was clearly aimed at Chinese
laundries.”
Many Chinese men came to the United States
to help build the western part of the
transcontinental railroad. After work was
completed in 1869, the nation fell into an
economic slump. Suddenly, said historian
Roger Daniels, there were 10,000 unemployed
railroad workers on the West Coast.
The Chinese immigrant population was mostly
male, said Gong, and they were seen as a
threat to native workers.
While the exclusion act supposedly barred
“skilled and unskilled laborers” from entering
the U.S., merchants and some others were
allowed into the country. The law “really just
ended immigration of Chinese laborers,”
Daniels said.
A Forbidden Marriage
In the 1920s, Yee said, it was common for
Chinese families to send one son abroad to
earn money to send back to China. Her father,
who had grown up in Guangdong, took on that
role.
Fung's restaurant served what Americans
thought of as Chinese food in those years,
mostly chop suey and chow mein. Only later
did he add Cantonese dishes, egg rolls and
other menu items.
One of his first hires was a waitress, Lorraine
Kristoff, whose family was from Hungary. “She
said she knew two weeks after she met him
that she was going to marry him,” Yee said.
Neither family favored the marriage, and
Kristoff’s brother threatened Fung with
violence.
The two went ahead with the marriage anyway.
Fung, who followed Confucian teachings,
agreed to let the children be raised Catholic.
One Senator For Equality
Yee and her twin sister were born during the
Depression, and were followed over the years
by two brothers and a sister.
The mostly male culture of Chinese immigrants
was not unique to Pittsburgh.
All but a few Chinese women had been kept
out of the U.S. because of a fear that they
would be drawn into prostitution. After a long,
hard day of work, Chinese laborers often
turned to the opium dens simply because so
few women were around, Gong said. "I think if
they had been able to have wives and families,
it would have been a moderating influence.”
When the exclusion act was first passed for a
10-year period, he said, 30 percent of
Congress voted against it. After it was renewed
and then made permanent in 1902, only one
senator — George Frisbie Hoar — was willing
to vote against the law.
"All races, all colors, all nationalities contain
persons entitled to be recognized everywhere
as equals of other men,” he said. “I am bound
to record my protest, if I stand alone."
Families Reunited
One result of the exclusion act was that
Chinese-American men with families in China
were often unable to see them for years at a
time. When the law was finally lifted in the
1940s, its chief benefit was not just to allow
new Chinese immigrants into the country. It
also gave existing Chinese residents — and
their families — the right to live together and
become citizens in the U.S., Daniels said.
In 2012, Gong and others got Congress to
approve a resolution apologizing for the
American exclusion act.
Today, Yee knows that the Chinese
immigration picture is very different from when
her father came to the U.S. — highly educated
doctors, researchers and businesspeople now
make up many of the new arrivals.
While never forgetting her Chinese roots, Yee
over the years has grown to love America.
“I think every group that comes in to America
faces difficulty — but I also think America is a
country where if you really work hard and
sacrifice, you can make it. I really still think it is
the best country in the world, even though it
has problems," she said.